About Writing
Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews
Publication Year: 2013
Published by: Wesleyan University Press
Cover
Download PDF (2.3 MB)
p. C-C
Title Page, Further Reading, Copyright
Download PDF (72.8 KB)
pp. i-iv
Contents
Download PDF (39.1 KB)
pp. v-vi
Preface and Acknowledgments
Download PDF (79.3 KB)
pp. vii-xii
If you are a writer, more and more you’ll find yourself writing
about writing—especially today, as creative writing classes at
the university level grow more and more common.
Writers make their critical forays in many genres: letters to
friends, private journals, interviews, articles for the public, general...
An Introduction: Emblems of Talent
Download PDF (357.5 KB)
pp. 1-60
In July of 1967 I waited in a ground-floor room, yellow, with dark wainscoting and wide windows giving onto Pennsylvania greenery. First, four holding notebooks, followed by three in sneakers, two more with briefcases, another six in sandals and Bermudas, then another three laughing loudly at a joke whose ...
Part I SEVEN ESSAYS
Teaching/Writing
Download PDF (80.8 KB)
pp. 63-68
The young painter who has set about learning to paint “realistically”
is often surprised that the eye must do the learning;
the hand more or less takes care of itself. “But I can already see
what’s there! Tell me what I’m supposed to do to set it down.”
Keep your hand still and look more closely. ...
Thickening the Plot
Download PDF (64.9 KB)
pp. 69-76
I distrust the term “plot” (not to mention “theme” and “setting”) in discussions of writing: it (and they) refers to an effect a story produces in the reading. But writing is an internal process writers go through (or put themselves through) in front of a blank paper that leaves a detritus of words there. The truth is, practically...
Characters
Download PDF (56.3 KB)
pp. 77-84
Here are two points about characterization. Both, however, grow from a particular concept of story. A story is ultimately not what happens in the writer’s mind that makes her or him write down a series of words (that is the just discussed “story process”). Rather, it is what a given series of words causes to happen ...
On Pure Storytelling
Download PDF (92.1 KB)
pp. 85-94
I think the trouble with writers writing about writing (or speaking
about it) is the trouble anyone has discussing his or her own
profession.
I first came across this idea in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the
Novel (1927): you’ll do better writing about something you’ve
only done a little of, because you still preserve those first impressions...
Of Doubts and Dreams
Download PDF (89.6 KB)
pp. 95-106
The request to write about your own work—to comment on a collection of your own fictions, say—is, to most writers, an occasion for distractionary tactics. What you do when you “write a story,” like what you do when you bleed or heal, is too simple and too complicated for the mid-level exposition most...
After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He Had Been Pulling and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on “The Beach Fire”
Download PDF (89.5 KB)
pp. 107-116
I am going to be fairly tough in this story. You may find yourself asking, “Does Q— E— really deserve this horse-whipping?” Frankly I doubt it. Though I don’t think I’ve ever met him, chances are he’s a pretty nice guy. Chances are he comes off pretty bright, even in a room full of bright people. Chances are...
Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student
Download PDF (357.2 KB)
pp. 117-148
You write simply, we might add, so that your assumed intelligent reader can more quickly catch you out when you write down idiocies—and, if that reader is generous enough, so that he or she can bracket those idiocies and go quickly to what’s interesting among the suggestions in your work. From time to time (or...
Part II FOUR LETTERS
Letter to P—
Download PDF (81.2 KB)
pp. 151-160
Dear P—,
What a pleasure it was to read with you at La Taza this past
Saturday, there on Market Street in Philadelphia. The night’s
feeling was rich, informal, and literary in a way I liked. The
piece I heard you read was smart, witty, and foregrounded a political...
Letter to Q—
Download PDF (140.3 KB)
pp. 161-180
Dear Q—,
We are two days beyond the first snow. When, this morning,
I left my room (I think I told you, Dennis and I have been
housed in the back hall of a girls’ dorm), outside stood six rows
of bicycles, their handlebars, wheels, and seats piled and puffy,
making waist-high arches, white interlocked waves....
Letter to R—
Download PDF (116.8 KB)
pp. 181-200
Dear R—,
I received your letter of February 20, with the enclosed
poems, news clippings, biographical statement, photograph,
and the opening twenty pages of your novel, Time of Our Regret.
Your request for help was moving. Your basic question
seems, in effect, How does a writer go about achieving a literary...
Letter to S—
Download PDF (76.5 KB)
pp. 201-206
Dear S—,
Thank you for your letter.
I’ve read through the poems you sent and your story, “Dark
Finale.” It’s rather unclear from your letter what sort of response
you want. But since you’ve sent them, I must say, what first
and most strongly strikes me about the pieces is that they are...
Part III FiVE INTERViEWS
A Para•doxa Interview: Experimental Writing/Texts & Questions
Download PDF (423.9 KB)
pp. 209-270
Samuel R. Delany: I’d like to use your questions as an opportunity to talk about some ideas—and some texts. The texts come from among the alternative, or experimental, pieces I’ve read and reread over the last forty years that have given me much readerly pleasure. I don’t put them forward as any sort ...
An American Literary History Interview: The Situation of American Writing Today
Download PDF (174.2 KB)
pp. 271-298
1. No matter how strict your sense of career as an individual endeavor, do you also find that your writing reveals a connection to any group—political, religious, cultural, national, international, racial, class, gender, sexual, or other? Do you see your...
A Poetry Project Newsletter Interview: A Silent Interview
Download PDF (84.7 KB)
pp. 299-310
Samuel R. Delany: I can’t believe you’re really frivolous enough to think that, because I’m a science fiction writer, I have some privileged, informed, or even interesting take on the future, more than do ditch diggers, dry cleaners, insurance salesmen —or, indeed, the run-of-the-mill poet or novelist. The only ...
A Black Clock Interview
Download PDF (179.6 KB)
pp. 311-336
Samuel R. Delany: I read both. I was an avid science-fiction reader. I read it morning, noon, and night. But I read everything morning, noon, and night. I read lots of literature. And I read lots of science fiction. Paradoxically, the most emotional things that happened to me as a reader tended to come from the science...
A Para•doxa Interview: Inside and Outside the Canon
Download PDF (233.1 KB)
pp. 337-374
Samuel R. Delany: The Oxford English Dictionary devotes two and a quarter columns to some fourteen definitions of the word —from “canon” as rule (from the Greek jamx´ m), through “canon” as “a standard of judgment or authority; a test, a criterion, a means of discrimination,” through “canon law,” the biblical...
Appendix: Nits, Nips, Tucks, and Tips
Download PDF (242.1 KB)
pp. 375-419
About the Author
Download PDF (26.1 KB)
p. 420-420
E-ISBN-13: 9780819574244
Print-ISBN-13: 9780819567154
Page Count: 432
Publication Year: 2013
